Booker Prize Longlist 2024

The Booker Prize Longlist 2024 has just been announced. The longlist of 13 books – the ‘Booker Dozen’ – has been chosen by the 2024 judging panel and features novels by Tommy Orange, Percival Everett and Rita Bullwinkel.

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Booker Prize Longlist 2024

More than half of the 13-strong longlist for the Booker Prize’s £50,000 award, known as the Booker Dozen, are American writers. There are three debut novels jostling alongside international bestselling authors and six writers previously nominated for the prize. Eight women and five men are nominated.

This year’s longlist spotlights stories about belonging and displacement, featuring literary heavyweights such as Richard Powers and Percival Everett. This year’s “glorious” list comprises “a cohort of global voices, strong voices and new voices”, said judging chair and artist Edmund de Waal.

Tommy Orange, who is the first Native American to be nominated, has been celebrated for his second novel, Wandering Stars, a story that spans centuries as it charts the pain of displacement and the search for belonging. The panel called it “a literary tour de force that demands attention”.

Percival Everett was longlisted for James, which reimagines Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. The judging panel said Everett’s novel “stands as a towering achievement”.

British-Libyan writer Hisham Matar is another past nominee who is nominated this year for My Friends, a story of two Libyan students caught up in a violent demonstration.

Yael van der Wouden is the first Dutch author to be nominated for the Booker Prize with The Safekeep.

Headshot by American author Rita Bullwinkel explores an amateur girls’ boxing championship in the United States that the judges described as “A gutsy, unflinching depiction of a young women’s boxing tournament in Nevada and a profound examination of identity, destiny and family dynamics”

Charlotte Wood is the first Australian writer to be longlisted in eight years with Stone Yard Devotional. The panel said: “The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges.”

Six of the longlisted authors have previously earned a Booker Prize nomination. Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers appears on the list for a third time with his latest work Playground, described by the judges as “Polynesian islanders prepare to vote on a billionaire’s seasteading project in an exhilarating novel that distils subjects as diverse as climate change and colonialism”

The shortlist of six books will be announced on Monday, 16 September while the winner of the Booker Prize 2024 will be announced on Tuesday, 12 November. The winning author will receive £50,000.

The 2024 judging panel, which consists of artist and author Edmund de Waalm, writer and professor Yiyun Li, novelist Sara Collins, Fiction Editor of the Guardian Justine Jordan, musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.

The judges are looking for the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024.  